Every Story Is a Ghost Story: The Millions Interviews Samantha Hunt

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Samantha Hunt won critical acclaim for her first novel, 2006’s The Seas, capturing a National Book Award “5 Under 35” nod. Her follow up, 2008’s The Invention of Everything Else, earned her a spot on the Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist. Her fans have waited seven years for her new novel, Mr. Splitfoot.

Mr. Splitfoot is about Ruth, a foster child turned con artist turned mysterious mute. Two parts of her life are told in alternating chapters. The first is from her youth: she meets a fellow foster child named Nat and the two become as close as siblings. The second is years later, when she mysteriously returns to her long lost niece, Cora. Ruth refuses, or is unable to talk, yet convinces Cora to walk across upstate New York on a life-altering pilgrimage.

We interviewed Hunt early one morning over the phone and talked about researching religion, mediums, and ghost stories.

The Millions: Let’s just start off with genre. Your last book really blended historical fiction and science fiction, and Mr. Splitfoot is a modern, gothic ghost story. What draws you to certain genres and styles when it comes to writing?

Samantha Hunt: Hmm. I can’t say that it’s originally part of my thinking. I mean the interest in Tesla one was just him. So, I was surprised that I ended up writing historical fiction. In fact the first time I got invited to a historical fiction conference I was like, “Me?! What?!” But they told me like, yeah, I did write a historical fiction novel.

With this one, I think it’s different. Who isn’t interested in ghost stories? Maybe there are some people, but I find it hard to imagine. The most natural interest in the world is death. So that was I guess the idea from the start. Really, the start of this book was a record that I cut off the back of a box of Honeycombs when I was probably six years old that was given out at Halloween. It was really scary. First of all, it was amazing that they were giving out records on the back of a cereal box. I was totally obsessed with it. It was a recording of the story of the [vanishing] hitchhiker. It’s in the book again and again. I keep telling that ghost story in Mr. Splitfoot. So that was the real start.

You probably wouldn’t even notice [the use of the story]. In my own thinking I notice. There’s one very obvious retelling of it and then I keep on coming back to the hitchhiker story.

TM: I don’t know much about ghost stories. I never sat around a campfire trying to scare people or be scared. Yet that initial early use of that tale that Ruth tells really struck me. And then she says that every story is a ghost story. Do you personally believe that sentiment? Or did you just attribute it to Ruth?

SH: I think that I definitely believe that. I don’t think I would have said that when I was younger. Now, you know the longer you live means the more people that die, and it’s like every story is a ghost story. Everybody’s dead. It’s not in such a bleak way. It’s just that everybody, every character, will die eventually. Everybody’s life is a ghost story. Wow, that’s totally bleak. I’m trying to convince you that it’s not, but it totally is. Maybe I just like to think about ways to use the hauntedness of life in a different way. To think about “haunted” is not necessarily a bad thing; to think about our dead in a different way. To use them in some way. Even though the people using the dead in this book are total con artists, it does give some shake and hope to [the people they talk to].

Part of the reason for me going up to Lily Dale [a camp and meeting place for spiritualists] was because there is a spiritualist community there. I live in upstate New York — maybe you can tell that from the book’s setting — and Lily Dale is in another part of the state. It’s kind of this wonderful, creepy spiritualist community. They have mediums there all of the time. A lot of the people there were parents of dead children. I understood it. To me, it seemed like a really hopeful thing. That they would go and try it, even if it meant paying these con artists to “talk” to their children. It seemed like such a hopeful thing, because how could you go on if your child died? You couldn’t. You would need some understanding about why something so sad could happen.

TM: Did you research these con artists yourself?

SH: When I was researching this book I did go to mediums. I never believed them, but I was definitely affected by them.

TM: What do you mean by you didn’t believe them, but they still affected you?

SH: Well the first lady I went to, I went in and was very skeptical and cynical. That was in Lily Dale. She tried contacting this older women with emerald rings on, but I was like, “Oh I see how you go there: girl with red hair, Irish girl, emeralds.” So immediately I realized she was a complete con artist. But it didn’t matter, because the next person she tried she said to me, “So there’s a man here and he wanted you to know that in life he would have never walked through those gates.” My dad is dead and he’s a total skeptic, but even though I didn’t believe him I was in total shock and tears. I couldn’t stop. She asked what I wanted to say to him and so I sat there sobbing and sobbing on her couch even though I wasn’t falling for this. It didn’t matter at that point. It affected me that she was able to cut through a lot of bullshit and ask me to talk to a dead person. I was pregnant with the twins at that time, but she didn’t pick up on the two other people in the room. (laughs) So immediately after I talked to my mom and she said how the lady tried a lady first in case my mom was dead and then when I didn’t respond she tried a male. But it didn’t change anything. After the book was complete I went back and asked that medium to give me a blurb from Charlotte Brontë. And she did. (laughs)

TM: When I saw that in the press packet I thought “What the hell is this?” But now it makes sense. This is Charlotte talking to me. Let’s talk about the genesis of the entire book. So you’re a kid and you get a recorded version of a ghost story on the back of a cereal box and you decided to write this decades later. There are two stories in this: Ruth and Nat but also Ruth and Cora. Which came first?

SH: Ruth and Cora came first. I was pregnant with twins when I started writing this book. I couldn’t walk much and was pretty immobilized because of the pregnancy. I also just moved to upstate New York, so the idea of walking across the state was interesting. I was in a place I didn’t know and wasn’t able to explore. So I just sat there and had time to work. I fantasized about walking across the state to see what it was about, but couldn’t because of the immobilization.

After the twins were born, I took the family on the road and we went all over upstate. One of the most startling things — and I grew up down by the city and lived in the state nearly my entire life — but I knew so very little about upstate. It was kind of amazing and how shocking about how many American religions were founded up here. Like the Spiritualists and the Mormons were like 15 miles from each other. I kind of liked that idea that there was a time where this could happen. That someone could shout at people that god was angry at them because of a solar eclipse.

Out of that came the idea to build my own religion to see what kind of con artistry I could work into it. The way I did that was that I just sat down and thought about what I would throw in. I threw in all of the good things that I like. I studied geology as an undergrad so I added some geology. I was watching the new Cosmos with my girls and I watched the original one as a girl. I remember what that meant for my family; it was a communal event. It was so amazing. So I added outer space to it too. And I have a really big record collection, so that became the third part of the religion. That was it: outer space, geology, records.

TM: So you came up with these ideas, and then how did research evolve?

SH: I started researching Mormons in New York. I lived in Vermont for some time and I lived right down the road from [Mormon leader] Joseph Smith’s birthplace. I became interested in him then, and the idea of an American-made religion always interested me. So, once a summer in New York they throw a pageant in Hill Cumorah where he found the Golden Tablets. Mormons from all over the world come to this really remote place. I went, and it’s basically hundreds and hundreds of Mormons in costumes. I loved it. It was an amazing spectacle. It was a 10-story stage. They had ships flying through the air. Lightning bolts and Jesus flying in over the hill.

I just visited a lot of religious sites across upstate New York. It’s funny. Every time I say that, my husband says that it doesn’t have anything to do with my book. Which maybe it doesn’t, but it definitely got me there.

TM: I think you needed to have that deep understanding of the foundation of what it’s really like up there to have a story like this unfold in that realm. I definitely felt the religion. So all of this deals a lot with Cora and Ruth. When did the younger Ruth come into the scene?

SH: I wish I could tell you exactly when. I should be able to tell you this, but I think that relationship that Ruth and Nat has, that platonic girl-boy relationship is always in everything I’ve written. I don’t know why that is. I just have to keep exploring it. It’s like Hansel and Gretel. It’s the portrait of true innocence: starting off with this young boy and young girl and then see what the world does to them.

TM: Structure is really important to me when I read, and this one alternates past and present. When you were writing this, did you have two different documents and just decided to piece it together or how did that process work for you?

SH: I always had a vision in my head from the start that I wanted to have them bound back-to-back. I had done a lot of book making when I was younger so that seemed like no big deal, but I was really surprised that every single press said they couldn’t do it. So it was at the end when it came together that my vision had to be changed. So I like thinking of them as two distinct books. Even the idea that a person would read one story and then another would be interesting. Although, my idea of having them bound back-to-back was that both stories involve climbing the mountain and they were going to meet in the middle. It would all be solved in the middle at the top of the mountain top. I hope that structure still exists even if it’s in more of a traditional alternating chapter way.

TM: Which story would you want people to read first if it were bound that way?

SH: I think I would still start with [Ruth and Nat] in the foster home. If you were just going to read one and then another.

TM: I found it interesting when I was reading it because I wanted to skip ahead to learn more about Ruth and Nat or Ruth and Cora, but thought I shouldn’t because that would be cheating in a way. Now maybe I should have just done that.

SH: I like that it’s sort of left up to the reader. One person could read one book first and how different that experience would be if someone read the other book first. I mean there’s the fact that you can’t unread it once you’ve read it.

TM: I’ll officially tell people to read it different ways and get some research for you.

SH: (laughs) Sounds good, sounds good.

TM: I love that you get so immersed in your research as well as the narrative. Are you already onto the next book?

SH: Yeah, I started. The next one is more memoir based. A lot of it comes from the research I did for Mr. Splitfoot. I was just thinking of ways people get haunted. It’s still dealing with the idea of the ghost story very much so. I love the research part. It’s so much easier than the writing part for me. Maybe that’s the one common theme throughout the books. I could research Tesla for a long, long time. I could research ghost stories and religion for a super long time. It’s a lot less painful than writing books.

Adam Vitcavage
is a writer who lives in Phoenix. His interviews and criticism have appeared in Paste Magazine, Electric Literature, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and other pop culture sites. He sometimes blogs at vitcavage.com. You can also follow his daily antics on Twitter at @vitcavage.

"The parts of Solzhenitsyn that are funny aren’t there because he artificially introduced them. They're there because he’s trying to authentically replicate what life was like. And I’m trying to do the same."

I finished All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost by Lan Samantha Chang on a Sunday afternoon at my local coffee shop. The sun bathed the high-ceilinged room in gorgeous light, and my cappuccino had me nicely buzzed. I was not going to cry for the beauty of the small book I held in my hand, nor for the sadness of time passing and friendships lost or changed, but I wanted to. I'd started Chang's novel with the expectation that it would be a book about three poets in writing school and their magnetic teacher. It was about that--but only at first. The story spans many years, and many concerns, including what it means and takes to make art, and to love someone. It basically slew me, and I read it a second time a few days later, to get that feeling again.Chang's first year as the Director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop was my last year there as a student. I was lucky to have her as my thesis adviser.The Millions: I decided to read this book a second time soon after I had finished it, something I rarely--if ever--do. On my second read I saw so many more connections, echoes and motifs in the novel than I did on my first. The subjects and ideas that the novel is soaked in, poetry and love, yes, but also mortality and aging, marriage, and success, can be traced through all three parts. What's introduced thematically in part one, when Roman, Bernard and Lucy are students at The School (and when Roman has his affair with Miranda), ripples through the entire book. These ideas deepen and complicate and change with each part, as the characters get older, and that development is stunning. How did you come upon this structure, and how did you conceive of each part, both on its own and in relationship to the other two?
Lan Samantha Chang: The structure came instinctively. After finishing my first novel, Inheritance, I was unproductive for a few years. I’d reached the end of a creative period. There was almost no desire to write, and when I wrote, the work did not feel vital. Then in summer, 2006, a 50-page sketch of this novel tumbled out in the space of two weeks. My husband Rob, a landscape painter, and I were living at a painting school on a small farm in France. I opened my laptop one morning and began a classroom scene, not knowing who the characters would be. The writing felt unusually urgent and went at a feverish pace. By the end of our two weeks in France, the sketch contained the dance and graduation scenes from Part One, the final scene between Roman and Lucy in Part Two, and the final scene between Roman and Bernard in Part Three. I had a strong sense of what I’d need to fill the white space, but wasn’t entirely sure. I put the work aside.
Then two years went by when I didn’t touch the sketch. I felt the subject matter was esoteric and controversial. Although the story isn’t about writing programs, it begins in a program setting. I assumed many readers would not see beyond their own opinions about the setting in Part One. Moreover, the work felt very private, and I had started two other projects that seemed more socially acceptable. I’d also fallen, suddenly, into mid-life, with its responsibilities: my new job as director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop was demanding and, to complicate things, Rob and I had a daughter in 2007. After she was born, I realized I would not be able to get creative work done without taking a leave from work. The next year, I was fortunate to be given a Guggenheim Fellowship, enabling me to do so.
There’s something about having a family and full-time job, about always being aware of the needs of others, that can give the act of writing an illicit, desperate feeling. Every hour is bought by denying other people. During the Fellowship period, I tried for weeks, then months, to work on the two “more acceptable” projects, feeling more and more frantic. I got nowhere. Finally, my husband suggested I spend just one month of this precious time on the poets’ manuscript. During the month, I set up Bernard’s visit in Part Two; I wrote the long flashback between Roman and Miranda. Then I gave myself “just one more month” and wrote the long scene, set in the parking garage, between Roman and Bernard. The project had taken on, for me, the feel of a guilty secret. The hours of work were intense and concentrated, with very little time to doubt what I was doing. I was spending precious fellowship time on a story that gave me enormous pleasure, but one I assumed no one would ever want to read. When I had finished a draft, in fall 2008, I showed it to a good friend and then to a former teacher. They told me to keep going.
I see I haven’t answered your question, which is about the form of the novel. The form grew organically from the story. I wrote the story for my own pleasure, and I put it together entirely on instinct. I hardly tinkered with it and I never doubted it.
TM: In the past year or so, I've also interviewed Michelle Hunevenand Jennifer Egan, whose recent novels, like yours, depict the passage of time in ways that have startled and moved me. What went into covering this much time passing. How thrilling was it compress whole years into a single sentence? Did you realize this would be necessary before you began writing?
LSC: I wanted to write about characters whose adult lives’ defining moments took place in relatively concentrated sequences. To portray those defining moments required skipping a lot. I did take great pleasure in the leaps through time, as I was writing; there was a thrill in the ruthlessness of it.
TM: The language of this book is beautiful in its simplicity and there's an elegance that comes with the slightly elevated third person perspective that's able to distill consciousness in crisp, perfectly-articulated phrases. What was your approach to the sentence-making in this book? Since you were writing about poets, did the poetry of the language seem more important than usual?
LSC: I’m personally convinced that the authority of the “slightly elevated” third person comes from my having learned to write in the voice of “Workshop Director.” In the last five years, the University of Iowa has gone through a budget crunch, and I had to write a lot of documents in order to protect our program’s funding. It was imperative that I learn to write in a third-person voice with a weight of authority behind it.
It was not a goal to write poetically; the poets I know are so far beyond me in that arena that I tried to capture only their desire to write beautifully. But I do think there was a special pressure on the language in this project, a pressure related to its brevity.
TM: Bernard is such a compelling character to me. In Part Two, Roland observes in his friend's gaze: "that startling blue clarity, veering toward judgment, which Roman, feeling weary, now recognized as the extremity of innocence." Throughout the novel, Bernard is a figure of purity, an artist who labors in the pursuit of truth until he reaches what Roland calls "a piercing clarity of feeling" in his poetry. Bernard contrasts with Roland, who is so ambitious, and doubtful about his own work, and often quite selfish. How did Bernard's character emerge for you?
LSC: During the composition of the first classroom “bludgeoning,” Bernard appeared in his red tie, quoting Emily Dickinson. I was happy, even relieved, to find him. (I’d been writing from Roman’s point of view, sitting inside Roman’s malcontent.) Bernard’s “purity” felt familiar to me. In graduate school, we used to sit around asking ourselves, “If you had the choice between writing several decent books, and writing one great work, which would you choose?” Bernard would choose the one great work. Implicit in our discussion was another question: What would have to have sacrificed one’s life in order to make that work?
TM: Roman is also compelling to me: unlikeable, incredibly vulnerable, and often utterly devoid of self-knowledge. I was most interested in his relationship to women in this novel. Was that a big part of creating his character? What do you make of Roman, both as a man and a poet?
LSC: Roman is Roman. I can’t critique him or his relationships to women.
I wanted to write about a powerful feeling I’ve had as an adult: the sense of becoming aware of a truth long after it was too late to do anything about it. This feeling, akin to waking up after a dream, is central to my experience, and it seems to come after periods of great blindness, or lack of attention—periods that can last for decades. If anything, Roman’s defining quality—his awareness of his own desires, his needs, and the consequences of his actions far too late—requires that he be self-involved, also inattentive.
TM: Early on, Miranda tells her class that "few outside our world read the poetry that is written." Nowadays, this could be said not only of poetry, but short stories, maybe even literary fiction in general. I certainly felt a connection to these poets, even though I myself am a fiction writer. Why did you decide to write about poets and poetry? Was it a big leap from your own process and struggles as a prose writer?
LSC: At the risk of making gross generalizations: The lives of poets seem to distill and illuminate many of the questions all writers face. Because poets never write for money, the art-vs.-life choices they make are brought into sharp relief. Most of the poets I know are keenly aware of mortality and survival, they know we are all living on the edge of an abyss. This awareness brings them joy, and anger, and the ability to see clearly. Poets are the canaries in the coal-mine of our collective consciousness.
TM: Much of this novel is concerned with the question of whether poetry can be taught, and what makes a good teacher of poetry. It also considers the ways we become poets beyond instruction in the classroom---be it through romantic relationships, friendships, suffering, loneliness. You studied writing at Iowa and have been the director of the Workshop for a few years now. Do you have a particular philosophy of teaching or a way of considering writing in the classroom?
LSC: Every workshop is different, and what works well in one classroom conversation fails utterly in another. I don’t have a set philosophy about teaching, but more of an awareness that things are always shifting in the world and in the classroom, and that over the years it is the instructor who must adjust. At Iowa, I’m also highly aware of the limitations of teaching. The students are so gifted that the sources of their creative leaps, and of their periods of productivity, are internally discovered as much as they are externally provided. Why does one strong writer fail to grow, and how does another find discipline? It’s certainly not something over which I, as the instructor, have much control. Sometimes I feel I might achieve the same results as I do now if I were simply to gather my students and feed them chicken soup. I do see things very differently as an instructor than I ever did as a student. I’m aware now of the instructor’s vulnerability in a way I never was as a student. I’m fascinated by the academy’s current discourse about power dynamics that assumes the instructor holds all the power. It’s been my experience, as a teacher and director, that the students hold much more power than this discourse allows.
TM: Because this is a site primarily about books, I must ask you what the last great books you read were--one book of prose, and one of poetry.
LSC:The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing and Chronic by D.A. Powell

"It’s like walking a high wire without a net, but it’s a second career and it’s a chance to turn a corner. I feel I can really appreciate it at this point in my life because it’s the first job I’ve ever had where it’s just absolute blue sky."

Fiction that aspires to be something more than an entertainment commodity must, I think, ultimately be concerned with its own longevity, with the conversation it holds between itself and whatever has preceded it.

All along I said I wanted a community-focused bookstore, and that has really come to fruition so much sooner than I’d expected. I think the bonds with the community are going to just get stronger the longer we’re here.